Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo – all major software giants have a version of instant messenger. They are all free and have millions of loyal users. Many among of us have a problem with this picture. Our friends used to be scattered across all these IM platforms and there used to be an era where you’ll have to literally log into multiple apps to chat with your friends from various networks.

Trillian was the first multi platform chat client I encountered some eight years ago. It always had a free version and it has evolved a lot over all these years. Much has changed they way the app looks now and is way cooler than it used to be. Join me after the break to check out the newest avatar of Trillian.(more…)

Evolve is a small independently developed and published free client and website built for serious gamers.

Evolve is not game distribution software. It’s not set out to be a commercial program. It isn’t spammed with advertisements. It’s meant to work alongside other software. Unlike Steam, Origin, Battle.net, Uplay, or most other programs out there, you can use it to centralise your entire gaming experience. Although often confused with them, it isn’t a replacement for any of the programs listed above.

Gamers rejoice! Like many other VoIP (Voice over IP) programs, Mumble is a free software program designed for vocal communication in mind in a digital age. What sets Mumble apart for gaming communication is the promise of high quality sound and low latency, all while minimizing the use of CPU resources.

This low-resource design makes Mumble a top notch choice for gamers when compared to more traditional VoIP programs such as Skype which take up large amounts of CPU RAM and resources. Mumbles interface and bonus features, however, are what really makes the difference while in game.

The world is getting smaller by the day, since the advent of satellites. People have moved away from the expensive mobile phones to more elegant voice over Internet solutions like Skype. The fact that, more than 200 billion minutes of calls using Skype last year alone should speak volumes about its awesomeness.

When Redmond acquired Skype out of the blue for $8.5 bn a couple of years back people started seeing the next tech bubble. However it made a lot of business sense, in the wake of Google and Facebook virtually rooting MS from the IM market, until they completely botched it up. They missed several opportunities to tie Skype with their platform. Even weirder, there wasn’t an official release for their flagship Windows Phone 7 till late summer last year while there was back to back releases on iOS and Android platforms.

When Windows 8 was due, an acute app crunch was looming over their heads and had to dust off something from their own labs. Enter Skype Metro.

Perhaps the most basic requirement of any operating system is a good chat app. Windows 8 ships with the default Messaging app, but as it lacks Google Talk support, this essentially cripples that app. So in my quest to find Windows 8 apps for all of my day-to-day functions, I stumbled upon Chat.

The simply-named, even simpler program is one of many chat programs in the Windows 8 store that promise simple day to day use. But so far, I’d not stumbled upon a program that meets any of those promises, until I found Chat.

Inky is a new email application that, in the words of its website, ‘pulls all your email accounts together in one place, [and] sorts your mail by relevance, letting you see your most important mail first. Enjoy your email again!’ Taglines telling us to ‘enjoy’ our email again are as old as the hills, and we’ve seen them on at least a half a dozen ambitious mail clients who ultimately fail in their promise to assist with the drudgery of email.

What makes Inky different? Does it succeed in its promise to make email enjoyable? Read on to find out.

I have been on the lookout for the perfect email client for years. I manage multiple email accounts and need a lightweight program with lots of features, including rules and filters. EmailTray advertises itself as a full-featured, lightweight smart email client for Windows so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Let’s find out what EmailTray can do and if it can stand up against the big boys like Outlook, Thunderbird and Postbox.

Twitter, as pretty much everyone now knows, is way more than just another social network. Possibly, the fastest growing network in the online world, Twitter acts as an instant real-time window to everything happening in the world for it’s users thereby imploring them to be online 24×7. Now, most people usually do a lot of tweeting on the go, from their cell phones which is helped by there being a vast array of feature-rich Twitter clients for most mobile ecosystems. The same however, cannot be said about desktop Twitter clients which is a shame since most of us also spend a lot of time on our laptops/desktops and reaching out for the cell every time you receive a mention or need to send a tweet is way too tedious.

The number of desktop Twitter clients is far and few and most of them are resource-hogging and heavy. While I don’t have anything against Tweetdeck, Seismic, Hootsuite, etc but I needed just a Twitter client, not a one stop app filled with all the social networks in the world. This is when I discovered Janetter, a lightweight, smooth and feature filled app which is a worthy contender to be called the best desktop Twitter client.

It is really hard to make friends especially after the age of 10. When you randomly talk to someone friendly, they think you are weird and just walk away. Awkward, isn’t it? Why put yourself through embarrassing situations when you have WNM Near Me?

WNM Near Me is a free, location based, social networking app that lets you find people who reside near you or any where in the world and you can chat with them without revealing your personal information or your phone number.

You might be asking why you would want to use a third-party remote desktop application seeing as Windows comes with Remote Desktop as standard. Many of the reasons do not become apparent until you actually use another application for remote desktop and realise what else is possible…

With TeamViewer, the way you connect to your computer is different (in a good way), but leaving that aside for the moment, the real strength of TeamViewer is its multi-platform nature. The supported platform list includes; Windows (including Windows 8), OS X, Linux, the TeamViewer web app, Android devices and iOS devices. As you can see the list of supported platforms is pretty exhaustive! This article reviews the Windows application, and gives a brief rundown of a couple of the other platforms.